Mom and Dad, 1957
Being a writer of greeting cards has to be a thankless undertaking. You'd have to churn out messages with appealing moods and textures that seem at least partially truthful, while keeping the messages general enough to be somewhat attractive to large numbers of people. The cards you wrote would need to be wistful, but not melancholy, nuanced, but not emotionally complex. And above all, they would need to accommodate the various elephants in the room without even a hint of their presence. An impossible task. One designed to fail. No wonder then that selecting the right card is an exercise in finding the one that fails the least to say what you mean.
When I was a kid my parents socialized a lot in our home, but my brother and I never got to stay up late and hang out with the grownups. We'd be tucked in bed at the appointed hour no matter what. I used to love drifting off to sleep to the sounds of adults laughing and telling stories down the hall. The stories probably weren't meant for young ears, but I wasn't much interested in their content anyway. It was enough to know the people in charge of my world were happy, and to hear them cut loose with their friends was reassuring. My mother's voice was musical and floated above the others in a pleasing way. To this day I equate the sound of her laughter with a sense of well-being, but to my knowledge there is no card that says Dear Mom, Thanks For Laughing.
One afternoon when I was about ten my cousin and I made a fort out of a refrigerator box. We cut tiny holes for windows and decorated the inside walls with magic markers. Our mural quickly degenerated into scatological hieroglyphics. My cousin spelled out every dirty word we could think of, while I drew anatomically incorrect naked ladies. We giggled ourselves silly. Later, my aunt discovered our debauchery and called my mother to accuse me of being a bad influence. I listened from the next room as I heard my mother say, "My son doesn't even know those words." Up until this moment my mom had convinced herself that she was successfully raising the only child in history that not only did not use cuss words, he didn't even know them. Never mind I could conjugate them backwards and forwards. My mother has always given me the benefit of the doubt, whether I deserved it or not. I'd be thrilled to find a card thanking her for that.
I may have been off the hook for the swear words, but not so the drawings. No one even had to ask who did them. I got grounded, but not long after that my mom got me private art lessons. Partly it was to keep me out of trouble, but also she had been paying attention to my constant art making and thought it might be something worth formally encouraging. When I look back at those drawings they seem completely unremarkable, with the possible exception of my dinosaurs. They were tight. Regardless of what my mom's motivation was, knowingly or not, she set me on the path I'm still on today. But try as I may, I can't find a card that thanks her for taking my dinosaur drawings seriously.
At a certain point I stopped letting my mother kiss me in public. After that I began dodging her good-night kisses. The moisture on her lips would make a little cold spot on my cheek that I'd instantly wipe off. That was probably hurtful to her, but I wouldn't have known. She persisted for a while, trying to win me back from my own impending adolescence, but I was pulling away, growing up - and apart. There were times when I would have gone back and reclaimed a few of those unwanted kisses, but the road to adulthood allows no u-turns. If I chose to be sentimental about it, I'd look for a card that let my mom know her affection wasn't lost on me. Not even in those surly teen years.
Mom, actual size.
These days I only see my parents two or three times a year. With 2000 miles between us, that's the best we can manage. My mom always wears her orthopedic hiking shoes when she comes out here to Colorado. I fix her and dad up with some trekking poles, and they oblige me as I take them on the mildest trails I can find. We've been hiking together for years. It's what we do. On a recent trip I drove them up a remote jeep trail to have a picnic on a mountain pass high above Crested Butte, Colorado. It was a blustery summer day and the sun beat down on us through the thin atmosphere at 11,000' elevation. We spread our picnic on the hood of the car and washed down turkey sandwiches with Gatorade. Far below us the valley sloped into a glacial bowl filled with summer's fading wildflowers. The first hint of storm clouds were lazily assembling on the horizon. Above us towered Cinnamon Mountain. I knew my folks would never have chosen that place for a picnic, and that my mother was way outside her comfort zone, what with the 4-wheeling, lack of guard rails, and no restrooms. They indulged me, because as mid-westerners, my family is easily smitten with the severe beauty of Colorado, but also because they are learning to trust me to deliver them safely to and fro in the wilderness – which is something. If I could find a card that said Dear Mom, Thanks For 4-Wheeling With Me, I'd feel like I was getting somewhere.
It's foolish to think something from a card rack could tell my stories for me, or could be grateful in ways that really mattered. No card does that. Flowers don't do it either, though they are an excellent place to start. There are many other ways to be thankful, and I'm just beginning to explore them.
Happy Mother's Day.
For Jeanine Howell
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